I meet people occasionally who think motion pictures, the product Hollywood makes, is merely entertainment, has nothing to do with education. That’s one of the darndest fool fantasies that is current . . . . Anything that brings you to tears by way of drama does something to the deepest roots of our personality. All movies, good or bad, are educational and Hollywood is the foremost educational institution on earth. What, Hollywood more important Harvard? The answer is not as clean as Harvard, but nevertheless farther reaching.
–Carl Sandburg, poet laureate
I believe cinema is now the most powerful secular religion and people gather in cinemas to experience things collectively the way they once did in church. The cinema storytellers have become the new priests. They’re doing a lot of the work of our religious institutions, which have so concretized the metaphors in their stories, taken so much of the poetry, mystery and mysticism out of religious belief, that people look for other places to question their spirituality.
–George Miller, filmmaker
The 82nd Academy Awards will be held on Sunday. This year the Best Picture category was supersized from the usual five nominations to ten.
- Avatar
- The Blind Side
- District 9
- An Education
- The Hurt Locker
- Inglorious Basterds
- Precious
- A Serious Man
- Up
- Up in the Air
Despite this expansion, there are only five serious contenders for Best Picture. The clue: nominees for Best Director.
- Avatar: James Cameron
- The Hurt Locker: Kathyrn Bigelow
- Inglorious Basterds: Quentin Tarantino
- Precious: Lee Daniels
- Up in the Air: Jason Reitman
Four questions every movie-goer should be asking:
- Which movie will win Best Picture?
- Which movie should win Best Picture?
- Which movie(s) should have been nominated for Best Picture?
- Which movies of 2009 were your favorite?
Here are my answers, and I invite you to share yours as well:
- Avatar will win Best Picture.
- The Hurt Locker should win Best Picture but Kathyn Bigelow will be awarded Best Director for her movie.
- Bright Star should have been nominated for Best Picture.
- My favorite movie of 2009 was Bright Star. Runners-up: Julie & Julia, (500) Days of Summer, An Education, The Hurt Locker, Gomorrah, The Young Victoria, Summer Hours (foreign movie), and The Class (foreign movie).
A. O. Scott (film critic of The New York Times), Annette Insdorf (Director of Undergraduate Film Studies at Columbia University), Stephanie Zacharek (film critic of Salon), and Dana Stevens (film critic of Slate) appeared on the Charlie Rose Show to discuss the Oscar nominations. Watch the episode here.
Regarding my favorite film of 2009, A. O. Scott writes eloquently about the freedom from hypocrisy in his review:
Ms. Campion is one of modern cinema’s great explorers of female sexuality, illuminating Sigmund Freud’s “dark continent” with skepticism, sympathy and occasional indignation. Bright Star could easily have become a dark, simple fable of repression, since modern audiences like nothing better than to be assured that our social order is freer and more enlightened than any that came before. But Fanny and Keats are modern too, and though the mores of their time constrain them, they nonetheless regard themselves as free.
The film is hardly blind to the sexual hypocrisy that surrounds them. Fanny can’t marry Keats because of his poverty, but Brown blithely crosses class lines to have some fun with (and impregnate) a naïve and illiterate young household servant (Antonia Campbell-Hughes). That Fanny and Keats must sublimate their longings in letters, poems and conversations seems cruel, but they make the best of it. As does Ms. Campion: a sequence in which, fully clothed, the couple trades stanzas of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” in a half-darkened bedroom must surely count as one of the hottest sex scenes in recent cinema.
The heat of that moment and others like it deliver Bright Star from the tidy prison of period costume drama. Ms. Campion, with her restless camera movements and off-center close-ups, films history in the present tense, and her wild vitality makes this movie romantic in every possible sense of the word.
Brett McCracken’s review in Christianity Today touches on why modesty is an erotic virtue and how love begets love:
In Bright Star, Campion employs a similar Victorian-era restraint to that of The Piano (1993), which was also a deeply sensuous but equally corseted period piece. Bright Star is even more understated (and at PG, more family friendly) than The Piano, but it is equally sweeping, mysterious, and sexy. The most we get are a few kisses between Keats and Brawne, but we hardly even need those. The chaste romance is infused in every frame and costume and set piece of this film. It’s an intoxicatingly romantic film that I think Keats would find very favorable.
The love story is one thing, but the romance of Bright Star is also in its visual splendor and all-around loveliness. Cinematographer Greig Fraser does a superb job photographing the pastoral English countryside in all seasons, the life and customs of Regency-era Britain, as well as smaller-scale details like the sensual beauty of hands touching or a needle weaving. This is the feeling of falling in love: lying on a bed as the window curtains flap wistfully in the warm spring breeze; climbing atop a flowering tree and lying between its branches and the sun-filled sky; composing letters to our distant love while sitting at a desk by a window looking out to the sea. We don’t need to have heaps of dialogue or sappy soliloquies to know that love is in the air for these characters. We must simply look at the butterflies in the grassy field in the same way these characters do, recognizing that love makes you love others and love things more. It makes you love life.
Jane Campion appeared on the Charlie Rose Show to talk about Bright Star. Watch the episode here.
This Sunday plop yourself on a crushed velvet sofa, open a bottle of voluptuous Pinot noir, and gawk at the glitterati who bow to the androgynous statuettes. In my imagination, I will be strutting down the red carpet with my ravishing date who is adorned in Harry Winston diamonds and a homemade dress.
Fun stuff:
March 4th, 2010 | 10:32 am | #1
I haven’t seen most of the best picture nominees and only two of the Serious Contenders (Avatar, and, just recently, Inglorious Basterds).
So all I can say is that Basterds surprised me. The impression I have is that Tarantino is dismissed as just an admittedly deft American director who mixes gangster and martial arts stuff.
But Basterds was rather remarkable: these long, long scenes with people simply talking, as in the opening conversation between the German SS officer and the French farmer.
I’m still not sure what Tarantino was doing with that technique but it changed the nature of a war movie into something else. I had a sense that he both trusts and loves the narrative power of movies in dialog and image. Which is different from being a special effects wizard or an actioner technician.
Fascinating, to quote Mr. Spock.
March 4th, 2010 | 10:44 am | #2
For a Christian to be so enamored of the Oscar event is, in my opinion, so much worshiping at the altar of idols.
March 4th, 2010 | 12:09 pm | #3
My view of the Oscars varies from year to year. The system is politicized both internally (pleasing each other) and externally (pleasing the Left). The former has always been there, but the latter was only periodic until the last few years.
Avatar will win, probably multiple awards, if only because of its popularity/profitability.
Up was fun.
Those are the only two we saw this past year. I might go see The Book of Eli tomorrow. Haven’t see it on anyone’s list, though. Or will that be on next years? I lose track.
I want more movies like Galaxy Quest, Sky Captain, and Gran Torino.
March 4th, 2010 | 12:52 pm | #4
[...] HT: Christopher Benson [...]
March 4th, 2010 | 12:52 pm | #5
Of the ten films mentioned, I have seen Up. So I vote for it. I did not spend the time and money to see the rest of these and probably won’t. I will not watch the Oscars, but I will read who won in the paper.
March 4th, 2010 | 1:45 pm | #6
Mr. Benson,
I have seen the trailers for most of these movies, but I cannot go and see them. This is a personal decision. I am a pastor, and hopefully you will follow me as to why I cannot go to the majority of these films. It has nothing to do with legalism, I assure you. (At least, I do not think so.) It has to do with me.
In the review of your favorite movie, the author notes this:
Brown blithely crosses class lines to have some fun with (and impregnate) a naïve and illiterate young household servant (Antonia Campbell-Hughes).
I do not go to movies like this, I imagine, for the same reason many war veterans do not go and watch war films. I invest spiritually and emotionally into people like the character Antonia Campbell-Hughes portrays. It is the nature of my vocation as a pastor to see up close and personally the horrors of sin. I have no interest in coming home and paying to see it displayed once again on the “silver screen,” good cinematography or not. Strong story or not. It is emotionally draining for me because it reminds me of what I have seen and dealt with. And I need to save that energy for real people. I suppose, then, my problem is that I actually invest myself too much into the story on-screen, because I do love a good story!
So, this year I went and saw Star Trek and Up in the theater. Not exactly high-brow entertainment, and I was very miffed that they blew up Vulcan. I mean, come on!
March 4th, 2010 | 6:18 pm | #7
Christopher Benson, here you are once again ruffling feathers :D
A. O. Scott is very, very good. I think I shall have to check out Bright Star if I can find the time.
I was just reading Leon Kass’s piece on courtship, where he argues that modesty is the virtue for chaste, yet alluring women.
March 4th, 2010 | 6:34 pm | #8
Film enthusiasts may be interested to note the just-released 2010 Arts & Faith Top 100 Films list.
To quote Jeffrey Overstreet:
Sure, you might expect a list of “the Great Movies” chosen by a group of Christians to favor titles popular with religious audiences…like Fireproof, “the Jesus movie,” The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, or The Nativity Story.
But it is exactly this tendency that fires up the folks at ArtsandFaith.com.
Christian media have in recent years tended to celebrated art and entertainment for its “evangelical potential.” In other words, many Christians have become so concerned about the usefulness of art as a tool of ministry and evangelism, they’ve forgotten—or never known in the first place—what art really is, and how it works.
As a result, “Christian art” has become more and more didactic and simplistic. Its messages are easily paraphrased. No wonder the rest of the world dismisses it so easily.
Who can blame them? People turn to art for an imaginative experience, not a lesson or a sales pitch.
March 4th, 2010 | 8:55 pm | #9
By the way, The Class was indeed an excellent little film. And I’ve heard very good things about Summer Hours and A Serious Man, as well as Bright Star.
Two recent films I enjoyed are Police, Adjective and Munyurangabo.
March 5th, 2010 | 12:45 am | #10
[...] About The Oscar’s 2010 March 4 tags: Oscars by Ryan Christopher Benson at Evangel posted on a wide variety of Academy Awards related topics this week. Stuck in the middle of the post, he [...]
March 5th, 2010 | 7:48 am | #11
Those who truly love film ought to find the Oscars odious. This dull, political, money infused love fest among the most narcissistic among us has become a joke. You can trace its demise roughly from the last time Bob Hope hosted it, when you had the sense people who really cared about movies were serious about the votes.
And it’s been hard enough to find five films worth watching over the last few years, let alone ten! Sheesh. Avatar? Horrible, cliche ridden script (see, Titanic). The Hurt Locker? Full of offensive errors about what really happens. Bright Star? Mediocre movie, but a great performance by Jeff Bridges. He is the one “bright” spot here, and will take home Oscar, well deserved.
But I can read about it in the morning. I’d rather watch paint dry than the Oscar telecast.
March 5th, 2010 | 12:21 pm | #12
Yes, you’re right…I typed “Bright Star” before my second cup of coffee! Maybe even during my first. Yeesh. And yes, you can find good films if you live in a big city and look for them.
I find it difficult to separate out film qua film from its content, though.
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